V18/11 - Day 5

2011-10-22

This post is part of the series Young Endeavour.

The previous night we had an anchor watch instead of our normal 4-hour shift in which only 3 people were on watch, and only for an hour so as to keep an eye on the boat and perform rounds.

In the afternoon we had sail theory, and were told the purpose of each of the sails and how they affect the ship's movement. We spent the afternoon sailing around the bay, whilst watching all the nearby humpback whales. They were lots of them and they were all pretty eager to flips and slap the water, we didn't get close to impressiveness as the whale in Sydney but was still an excellent afternoon.

In the afternoon we weighed anchor (or "wanker" as the staff called it, much like they shorten topsail to "tpsol" but funnier) and set sail back out to sea. This time the seasickness barely effected me at all, although not everyone was as lucky and there was still a few people that started throwing up again. Mostly though everyone had finally got their "sea legs".

That night on watch we had a team building exercise and had to put up the storm sail without instructions from Paul (we were allowed to ask 3 questions). I'm not sure how the other teams went, but I think we did pretty poorly. In the end we did get it set, and funnily enough a storm looked to be approaching as we were doing the task and the wind picked up a great deal.